A lot of stuff happened since last time and I'm starting college again in a couple of days, I think now is the time to write another wall of text about all that for my site.
First off; I attended Debconf 2025 in July, mostly out of curiosity because travelling there was rather simple. I wanted to be a site full of people experienced with coding again, no matter if it was like Revision or not. The attendants were welcoming and I even managed to make a few friends there, but in the end I felt out of place at the event; I only have very little knowledge about linux developpment and maintenance, even though I managed to learn more thanks to the many speakers and conferences organized there, I realized this was not for me. Despite of that I don't regret attending this, spending days socializing and learning new things turned out to be better than doing absolutely nothing in my room. I will take opportunities to attend other developper events like this one if I get ones.
Second, my family and I went on vacation across Europe, this was the first time in 15 years we could afford doing this and it was a nice break from all the nothingness I went through all the days I spent in my bedroom. I have taken 31 different trains during the whole trip and mind you, we travelled bewteen cities by car. I went to Sweden for the first time and I definitely want to visit more of the country later on. There I met a friend I first got to know through discord and thanks to the many voice calls we made beforehand meeting each other went really well. A few days later I visited Berlin a second time and managed to try out all its running U-bahn, S-bahn and tram rolling stock, which was very cool. Near the end of the journey I also rode some old trams in Milan and filmed Lyon's driverless metros.
Third, I attended Xenium 2025 in late August, which was an insanely ambitious project. Just to get there I had to take a train to Paris, fly to Berlin, sleep there, then take a few other trains to Łódź, Poland; all that alone, as an unnacompanied minor. Fortunately I made it there, but not without a couple of problems. First, the ID check at the airport was annoying; I had to prove I was legally allowed to travel and second, due to Deutsche Bahn delays I missed a train, but I showed up at a ticket office and they changed my bookings. I arrived at the party site in the evening, then quickly met up with Pator and AArt1256, who I already knew from discord and previous demoparties. My experience there was much better than Revision, I noticed how much my social and english speaking abilities improved since then and I didn't feel cringe anymore. There were less people than at Revision and the party was held in a much cosier place (a dorm hall instead of a giant concert room), which created an atmosphere that made me feel more confident; this helped me a lot when trying to to basically anything with other people. I spent the first day and a half working on my part for AArt's scratch demo, I felt really stressful as I had to fix quick hacks that broke parts of the code with more quick hacks, as a result my code is super messy, but it works as intended and the demo got submitted right before the deadline. In the meantime we also participated (and got destroyed) in a foosball competition, and I met Jammer, which was a big thing because he's one of my favorite musicians. I felt much better the day after the deadline, I could enjoy compos and concerts without worrying about whether or not I will be able to get my code to work on time. During the wild compo the audience seemed to have liked the production, but I also really liked some other entries so I had no idea if we would win. Then came the time to say goodbye to AArt and go back to my hotel room that... his mom generously paid me, this was a difficult moment for me because I don't know anyone else like him and being able to talk about the scene and the C64 with people IRL is something I just can't do outside of demoparties. The next day I left very early and got more issues with train delays. I watched the prizegiving ceremony while stranded at Poznań and learned that the demo got first place there. I felt awkward at that moment because I made an effect for a demo from a group I am not part of, which ranked first and I wasn't even on site to celebrate. (If you're wondering why I left early I initially wanted to pay for the hotel, and skip prizegiving so that I wouldn't have had to book a fourth night.) I also had issues with the airport ID check on the return trip, but I still managed get back home safely.
As expected the part about Xenium takes most of the space here, but it was just this impactful on me compared to the other ones. I have no idea when I'll write something here again what it will be about; not much is going to happen in my life outside of college for the next eight months. I still hope I will have time to work on my personal projects while studying.
I haven't touched this site in months and cringed when I saw what I wrote back in February, so for the third time of the year I'm doing changes nobody cares about just so that I can feel better about myself. If you visited this page before you might remember it as the Articles page; however I quickly realized I wouldn't have any motivation to make actual articles. Maybe I'll be able to do something if I use this format instead. Now that I think about it I remember considering to write a detailled breakdown of the bytebeat-based demo I released at revision (video here) because one scener I met there was really interested in what I was making, but after writing my comment on the video I thought I already said enough things about my prod so I gave up and that's the end of the story.
Also I may talk a bit about myself now thet I'm pouring some effort on my personal site (for once). I'm currently writing this at 5am because my sleep schedule is completely messed up. I've had virtually all the free time I want to work on personal projects since college ended in early May (I'm admitted to year two by the way), yet I'm even less productive than usual and this makes me feel like shit. In two months, I've made two bytebeat covers (and a few other related projects with the display tech I made the demo for revision) and three C64 programs that barely work (waving rasterbars, a sprite multiplexer and a DYCP scroller); that's pretty much it. All that could have been done in a single day if I were less lazy. I can't imagine what I could have done in two whole months at this pace, but instead of making a good use of my time I watch youtube until I run out of videos to see (trust me, that's not an easy task), then I open wikipedia and overload my brain with info about trains until I can't assimilate anything more for the day. Despite this I'm still having a decent amount of human interactions (not IRL of course), I've done a crazy amount of discord voice calls in the past few weeks. Due to that I'm improving quite a bit at speaking english, but at the same time seeing other people being productive doesn't help me get more motivation. I'm not even lacking ideas, in fact I have several (semi)-long term projects I want to finish, but I can't be bothered to learn new stuff or focus on coding for more than five minutes straight. "Fortunately" I will soon be forced to keep a schedule again and I really hope this will mark the end of my struggles with productivity (why am I even saying that).
That was pretty much everything I wanted to get out off my chest and on that I'm going to sleep.